Daly Mansion is emerging from restoration looking great

Nov. 10, 2013

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Tribune Staff Writer

Before being restored, the Daly Mansion in Hamilton, once the summer getaway for copper king Marcus Daly, sat empty for four decades. / Tribune photos/Kristen Inbody

Visit the mansion

The Daly Mansion has regular visiting hours mid-May through mid-October. In winter, tours are given weekdays by appointment, with 24-hours notice required. Call 363-6004, ext. 4 to arrange a tour. The mansion is at 251 Eastside Highway, near the fairgrounds in Hamilton. Admission to the mansion is $9 for adults, $8 for seniors, $6 for children 6-17, with younger children admitted free. The mansion has a lively calendar year-round, with a Dec. 21 community Christmas party and a Roaring ’20s New Year’s Eve party. Spring included a speakers series. The Mother’s Day Tea is the traditional beginning of the tourist season at the mansion. June brings a youth history camp. Daly Days, which includes historical re-enactments, is in July. One of the biggest fundraisers of the year is the Roundup at Riverside in early August, which includes dinner and a silent auction. The mansion hosts the Bitterroot Valley Scottish Irish Festival in August, too. During the first weekend in November, the mansion hosts a craft fair. For more information about events, visit dalymansion.org.

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HAMILTON – The bathroom yet unrestored in the Daly Mansion shows how far dedicated volunteers have gone in their efforts to bring the house back from the brink of total ruin.

Water stains the walls of what was Margaret Daly’s bathroom. Plaster is crumbled. Knob-and-tube wiring is exposed. Tiles are battered.

“We kind of like people to see where we came from,” said Darlene Gould, volunteer and house manager. “I get discouraged sometimes thinking we’ll never get it done, but we’ve come so far.”

About 90 people volunteer at the Daly Mansion, raising money, tapping maple trees and bottling syrup in the spring, maintaining the grounds, running the archives, manning the gift shop, helping put on events and guiding 6,000 to 7,000 visitors a year through the mansion.

The beautiful house, once a summer getaway for the family of copper king Marcus Daly, rotted, unused for four decades. Now the Daly Mansion is looking spectacular thanks to a lengthy restoration that is nearing completion.

“The most amazing thing is this place was empty for over 40 years, all boarded up, and the community came together to save it, and the community comes together still to keep the doors open,” Gould said.

Restoration

Gould has a pretty good idea how the current house fits with the original building, owned by Anthony Chaffin and remodeled by Marcus Daly in the 1880s to a Queen Anne-style mansion called Riverside. Margaret remodeled the home into its current Georgian-style Colonial Revival form.

Gould once lamented the loss of the striking Queen Anne version, which included a tower, but then someone noted that the wood mansion wouldn’t have survived the 40 empty years as well as the brick of the 1909 remodel.

Margaret Daly died in 1941, and by the 1950s, the house was in the hands of Daly’s granddaughter Margit Bessenyey, a Hungarian countess. After her death, her stepson, Francis, deeded the mansion to Montana in 1986 for forgiveness of $400,000 in taxes. The state owns the house and about 50 acres around it. The Daly Mansion Preservation Trust has full financial responsibility.

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Francis Bakach-Bessenyey was a supporter of the trust, but he died last year in Hamilton after a remarkable, cultured life.

Tours of the mansion began after the trust began operation in the 1980s. Renovation began immediately, with another major renovation drive beginning in 2005.

“We wanted people to be able to see the whole thing, plus it’s helped moving furniture,” Gould said.

The third-floor ceilings that shredded under the leaking roof are now above exhibit rooms that speak to the history of the Daly family and of the operation of the house and farm. The 90-minute guided tour takes in 17,000 feet on the first and second floors. On the third floor, “you can spend as much time as you want up here,” Gould said. “There’s so much to read.”

Expanding the collection in the third floor probably will be among the next major projects, Gould said.

“Both the Daly history and the mansion history — and how close it came to being lost — are interesting,” she added.

Other priorities include replacing the tent used for weddings and other outdoor events, outside repairs and continued restorations. The first floor is 95 percent finished; the second is 85 percent done. The third floor is a quarter of the way to what boosters envision.

“Of course it adds up to lots and lots of money,” Gould said.

The long-term goal is to have every room in the house restored. What remains to be finished includes Mrs. Daly’s bathroom, which is in ruins, as well as wallpaper in some areas and furniture in much of the house.

In 1986, an auction of household items scattered the contents of the mansion. The sewing room cabinet was the only piece of furniture that wasn’t removed. It wouldn’t fit through the door.

Slowly some items are returning to the mansion.

“Anything original to the house is so precious to us,” Gould said. “Sometimes people want us to buy it, and we just don’t have the funding for that.”

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The dining room furniture is original to the house, with a table that sat 18. A ladle came back this summer and is on display in the china hutch. Silver with a gold wash, the ladle, which dates from the 1890s, is engraved with “MPD,” Margaret Daly’s monogram.

Last year was a banner year, with 17 items returned.

“It’s like Christmas when that happens,” Gould said. “Our dream is to get everything back. Anything we can get back is wonderful.”

Paths to wander

With the Bitterroot Mountains as a dramatic backdrop, exploring the grounds and the view is a large part of the charm of a visit to the Daly Mansion.

The grounds were once part of Daly’s 22,000-acre Bitterroot Stock Farm, on which he had orchards, a deer park and livestock — most notably race horses (including Montana, the only horse bred in this state to win the Belmont Stakes).

Marcus Daly’s death in 1900 marked the beginning of the end of the farm and other Bitterroot Valley operations.

One corner of the grounds has a plunge, a swimming pool built in 1911. Unfortunately, it no longer holds water. The last effort filled the pool in 12 hours, only to have all the water gone in eight.

Not long ago, the 26 acres of landscaping was officially designated the Margaret Daly Memorial Arboretum and Botanical Garden. In October, a butterfly garden opened on the grounds.

The 50 different kinds of trees on the grounds of the Daly Mansion are shady in the summer and spectacular in the fall.

“When trees go down, we have a replanting program and replant the same type of tree,” Gould said. “I love this time of year with all the leaves turning.”